BEAUTIES OF THE DESERT 419 



half-digested food, from which even Tantalus would turn away- 

 disgusted. But the " ship of the desert " is not only provided 

 with water for the voyage, but also with liberal stores of 

 ftit, which are chiefly accumulated in the hump ; so that this 

 prominence, which gives it so deformed an appearance, is in 

 reality of the highest utility — for should food be scarce, and 

 this is almost always the case while journeying through the 

 desert, internal absorption makes up in some measure for the 

 deficiency, and enables the famished camel to brave for some 

 time longer the fatigues of the naked waste. Yet all mortal 

 endurance has its limits, and even the camel, though so well 

 provided against hunger and thirst, must frequently succumb 

 to the excess of his privations, and the bleached skeletons of 

 the much-enduring animal strewed along the road mark at 

 once the path of the caravan and the dreadful sufferings of a 

 desert-journey. 



But even these horrid wastes, where the glowing Khamsin 

 whirls the sands in suffocating eddies, have beauties of their 

 own. Particularly when the full moon shines in the dark 

 blue sky, bespangled with constellations of a brilliancy un- 

 known to the northern firmament, when the mountains throw 

 their dark shades far away over the yellow sands, and the 

 picturesque effect of the scene is enhanced by the aspect of the 

 tents, the watch-fires, and the reposing animals ; then we may 

 well conceive how the wandering Bedouin loves the desert 

 no less than the mariner loves the ocean, or the Swiss peasant 

 his snow-clad mountains, and how it inflames the imagination 

 of the oriental poets to many a song, solacing the tediousness 

 of the encampment, and handed on from one generation to 

 another. 



To the camel the vagrant Arab owes his immemorial liberty 

 and independence ; when attacked, he places at once the desert 

 between the enemy and himself. Thus he has ever been in- 

 domitable, and when in other parts of the world we find that 

 the fatal possession of an animal — the sable, the sea-otter — has 

 entailed the curse of slavery upon whole nations, the dromedary 

 in Arabia appears as the instrument of lasting freedom. Many 

 a conquering horde has been stopped in its career by the 

 desert, and while the false glory of the scourges of mankind 

 that have so often thrown the East into bondage passed like a 



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